Fugl: LOOK AT THIS LOVELY SWOOPY BIRD TRAILER!

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I’ve said pretty much everything important in the headline but I suppose I should do a few words in the box of our CMS to prevent it flipping out and so search engines can robo-read it or whatever it is they do with their robospiders. Fugl [official site] is a game about experiencing life as a voxel bird in a procedurally-generated voxel world.

Just a voxel bird…
Livin’ in a voxel woooooorld!
She took a swoopy flight
Goin’ EEEEEEEEEEEEEVERYWHEEEEEEEEEEEEERE!

Flap your wings and make a high speed run inside the deep valleys and canyons

Explore vibrant jungles, icy landscapes and mystical caves

Join a flock of birds

Land anywhere and take a relaxing break from the flying

Observe the emergent behaviour of the wildlife as the animals go about their day

AND THEN!

Meet and interact with the many creatures inhabiting the infinite world

Absorb the abilities of creatures you meet; land on water like a duck, hover in the air like a colibri, gain eagle sight, breath fire like a dragon

Join flocks of creatures

Be a friend or a foe and see the wildlife react to your actions

!!!!!

According to the comments on the Greenlight page, which is still being used for communication despite Greenlight now being defunct, the developer is hoping for an early access release soon. They say they’re aiming for this month although that’s not confirmed, it’s more of an intention at this point.

I wish I was a voxel bird.

Although, so far today, I have also wished I was an ant, a caterpillar, a scorpion-human hybrid with a gigantic claw and a stinging tail, a bear, an ice cream truck owner, and a cat.

Serious Sam does it even better – one of those claws is replaced with a scandalously large gatling gun.
Which is not very effective against the player, but that’s not the point; it looks completely awesome and therefore all arguments against it are null.

…

Now that I think of it, the creature design in SS is so much more creative than in most games with humongous dev teams behind them.
Headless kamikaze bomber with two comical bombs for hands that screams AAAAAAAA, like an alarm clock from hell? Check. Airborne, freakishly fast-flying torsos with faces and huge appetite? Check.
I love how much fun SS has with its creature design. Wish there were more shooters on this level of silly.

Deep inside your mind there’s a bird that you wanna be
Every single flight, where you glide has no end to see
Even though you try, you can’t reach the edge of the map

That my brain went to Offspring on the first attempt is probably evidence of Crazy Taxi induced mental illness. This reminds me a lot of Fruits of a Feather link to samuraipunk.itch.io, but with less fruit hunting and hopefully more polished mechanics. I could get into something like that.

One could raytrace against some isosurface of the voxels or use the voxels to define light scattering behavior of an object, but that would have a pretty different aesthetic, and I suspect it’d be computationally prohibitive if it were applied to the entire world.

Edit: This just refers to the rendering of voxels data without generating polygons. See also PseudoKnight’s comments below.

I think you’re talking about a voxel renderer, not voxel data. That is, the world and models are stored in 3 dimensional grid, not polygons like most games. The name is a combination of “volume” and “pixel”. A voxel renderer would go one step further. And some games have rendered voxel data in a way that looks like a more typical polygonal world, which is handy for terrain deformation.

If you’re still having issue with this definition, think of voxels compared to texture data. Textures are stored in a 2D grid whereas voxels are stored in a 3D grid. That said, there’s many ways to use the concept of voxels. I wish I could remember a great article that covered all the different ways. It was worth sharing.

This does look nice but I am often surprised that there aren’t more flying games that have a bit more of a budget so they can have some lovely colourful Nintendo / Studio Ghibli graphics. In other words, a modern Pilotwings. Everybody loves Pilotwings and I’d have thought some studio would be working on this type of thing by now.

It takes a lot to make me motion sick via a 2d screen (but very little in real life land) but this programmer’s previous iOS game Melodive was a dizzying one! I was not particularly good at it- never playing for more than 5 minutes or so, but still had fun with it. This one looks like a good chill time too, and less bonkers spinning through lumpy fractals.